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Do not forget about the Ukraine, and even Korea is a tough opponent. Everything is possible here, I do not feel now that we might promote...

Korea is steadily improving but hockey in the Ukraine is in descent and the actual political turmoil is imho not unlikely to affect their team negatively as well. I wouldn't be extremely surprised if the don't even travel to Korea...

Gerhard Unterluggauer (37, 244 caps) resigns from the national team citing more time for the family and leaving a spot for young players as reason.
Matthias Trattnig has announced not to be available for the trip to Korea saying that he lost the motivation to play for the nt in Sochi. On the portal hockey-news.info Trattnig is quoted saying that Sochi was the chance for a big success (1/4 final qualification) which might have given the sport a boost but instead the drinking incident and the failure of the federation to deal with it properly have ruined the team's image for years to come. Asked for reasons for the clear defeat against Slovenia Trattnig said that "it can't be that players are pissed 3 times in 10 days and in the end three drunk guys play on the powerplay".

Wow, not just one party...three nights out. At least one if not tow must have been before the game against Norway, maybe heavy drinking isn't too bad ;-)

So much for sarcasm, the attitude of the players seems to have been even worse than I thought and the team management is apparently even worse and ineffective as believed. Well done everybody. Wonder who will play on defense in Korea...that's going to be the rest of the rest.

Trattnig another out for Austria? On the heels of the Olympic debacle I don't see Austria getting back to IHWC this year, what with all the big names who have said "enough" and bailed out. This is truly sad, but hopefully finally a wakeup call to the Austrian federation that they are doing something very wrong with the NT.

Trattnig another out for Austria? On the heels of the Olympic debacle I don't see Austria getting back to IHWC this year, what with all the big names who have said "enough" and bailed out. This is truly sad, but hopefully finally a wakeup call to the Austrian federation that they are doing something very wrong with the NT.

Wakeup call, that's it. Unfortunately a wakeup call that propelled the situation from a bad dream to a nightmare. This is what happened this week; federation president Dieter Kalt sen. decided after almost two months and the various steps of escalation in the aftermath of "drinking gate" that it is wise for him to speak out too. He did so in an open letter published on the OEHV website. Matching the traditional incompetence in trouble shooting basically all Mr. President can offer is attacking the players who have critizised the lack of leadership of the team instead of putting all facts on the table, admitting the federations own failure, asking for pardon and committing to establish a more professional conduct of everyone involved in the future. The target of Kalt's rant is foremost Matthias Trattnig but also Thomas Pöck (Trattnig was outspokenly critical of the federation's trouble shooting in public recently) who he accused of having been out on the particular evening longer than agreed on himself. Trattnig and Pöck have made clear immediately after Kalt's accusations that they had indeed missed the bus which should take the players back from the event in house Austria they were attending to Sochi due to a misunderstanding but travelled back to the village by train only little later. So obviously guys who got home a little later than allowed due to a misunderstanding and dare to speak up about obvious leadership failures are the problem and not the guys who spent the whole night getting pissed.

Furthermore, in the meantime Thomas Raffl and Manuel Latusa have said not to be available for the trip to Korea.

Well, nobody wrote it. After we published it after the loss vr Slovenia, didn't want to do anything before the game. At first, Austrian hockey public&some players commented like:

"some morons, noname balkan web is insulting our players..."

and the next day, after twitter/facebook spread the story whole thing started.

I don't doubt at all that you guys were the first to write about the affair. I just think that if even if you had not written about it the thing would have surfaced. The rift through the team between the federation and (some= players is so deep that there's no way that this would have stayed internally. Basically the national team collapsed as a consequence of this affair (which was of course only the spark to cause the fire) so it is clear for me that it would have surfaced one way or the other.

Tonight the Austrian "emergency" team had the first of two prep games before the division IA championships next week hosting the well konwn rivals from Slovenia. While the Slovenians of course also had to go without a fair number of their regulars who are still playing with their club teams, the Austrian squad saw the probably biggest break in personnel continuity in its entire history. No less than 15 players from the Olympics team had to be replaced due to retirements, injuries, club team committments or combinations thereof and not too few of the first choice replacements who were not in Sochi are unavailable (resp. unwanted) as well.
The result was a crude mixture of few remaining core players from the last years and many EBEL no names who mostly play in the third and fourth lines of their club teams. Especially in the D corps nothing remains of the previous versions of team AUT, with Mario Altmann and to a lesser extent Martin Schumnig only two of the eight guys have any noteworthy international experience (and Altmann was by far the weakest spot in Sochi). Some of the new guys are still young and talented enough so that they might still develop into higher caliber players but most are EBEL role players and will always be. This how the roster looked like:

Slovenia was the clearly better team throughout most of the game but the Austrian rookie squad defended fairly well so that the score was only 2:0 after two periods. Both goals came from very similar situations when a pass from out of the corner resp. the from behind the goal line found a Slovenian forward (Marcel Rodman and rookie Miha Logar) who moved unchecked into the slot area and beat the goalie. But although the Austrians created only few chances in the game the hosts didn't remain scoreless. After a brilliant long pass from Markus Schlacher (the former forward from Villach was turned into a defenseman in Vienna) Brian "who else" Lebler scored in a one on one situation and 15 seconds to the end with the goalie pulled again Brian Lebler struck after the Slovenian defense left him unattended in front of the net and (again) Schlacher served him the puck after a wild scramble behind the goal line.
In overtime however KHL forward Jan Mursak finished the affair with an accurate and hard wrist shot into the top corner.

Initially I had expected that AUT would get hammered but actually it was not a bad game. Of course except the usual Leb... sorry suspects there's not enough talent to create serious offense but the defensive game was okish and there was a good workethic and effort. Btw, Bernhard Starkbaum in goal switched with U20 goalie David Kickert midway through the game and the Vienna Capitals netminder did a very good job. With his height and size he's definitely a prospect for the years to come.
Once the EBEL finals are done a few players from Salzburg will/should join the team (D: Dominique Heinrich probably Florian Mühlstein; F: Andreas Nödl, Konstantin Komarek, Andreas Kristler), that will make the team a little bit better.

The next game of team AUT is on Saturday in Budapest against Hungary. The Hungarians will also play Slovenia (Sunday at Budapest). Slovenia is the clear cut favourite for promotion in Seoul everything else is wide open. Hungary and Austria are contenders but for obvious reasons I wouldn't be surprised if AUT won't re-promote this time.

After the (at least relative to the previous div I tournaments) surprising 2nd place and re-promotion to the top level for 2015 the Austrian federation has announced today not to extend the contract with head coach Manny Viveiros. Just yesterday Viveiros has said that he would like to continue to work with the team but apparently OEHV sports director Alpo Suhonen who was rumoured not to be in good terms with Viveiros several times has got his way. The new coach shall be presented until August.

The story goes on: yesterday Manny Viveiros has spoken out in an interview with "Kleine Zeitung" that the federation has not extended his expired contract because of sports director Alpo Suhonen being against him ever since he was hired by the federation, despite he thinks that the results the team achieved during his time were adequate. He accused Suhonen of lacking any plan or concept to develop Austrian hockey and said that the only thing he has seen Suhonen do was staying with the senior men's team as opposed to with the under age teams which he was supposed to do. Furthermore, Viveiros said that a finnish junior coach Suhonen brought to a development camp was notoriously drunk just as a finnish doctor Suhonen had invited to give a lecture at a coaching symposion. Viveiros also gets tough on federation president Kalt who he sais hasn't taken a minute to speak to him and explain him why his contract wasn't extended.

Today Suhonen and Kalt responded via the media denouncing all of Viveiros claims and accusing him of various shortcomings instead.

Red Bulls coach Dan Ratushny has selected his first national team roster for the EIHC tournament in Ljubljana end of October. Due to their CHL involvement no players from Salzburg and Vienna have been selected.

Goalie David Madlener who replaced Dornbirn's injured import netminder Mike Murphy very well in the recent games is making his debut on an AUT national team (interestingly he wasn't even on any U18 or U20 nts). Same goes for Patrick Obrist (who was of course on several junior nts before). Due to the many retirements last season and the Red Bulls and Caps players being left out this is except for the NLA guys pretty much the roster from the div. IA tourney in Seoul last April. Should be competitive against Japan in Ljubljana but without a real chance against Belarus and Slovenia.

Sad news: the Austro-Canadian defenseman James "Jim" Burton has died from a heart attack at only 53 years of age. Burton played in Austria (Lustenau and Klagenfurt) from 1988 to 1996 becoming a naturalized citizen in 1991. He represented Austria in 4 world championships (one group B) and the 1994 Olympics in Norway. A very skilled an sportsmanlike player, one of the best "Austros".

In preparation for the world championships both North American teams will make a stop in Vienna and play against Austria. Sounds good, most likely going to watch these games (28.4. AUT - CAN, 29.4. AUT - USA)

Time to wrap up what has happened related to the AUT senior men's NT lately.

After the Team has failed to gain promotion to the elite for the first time in 10 years and 5 attempts in Poland Coach Daniel Ratushny has expressed his desire to continue his work despite that he will leave Salzburg and Coach HC Lausanne in the Swiss NLA from now on.
Apparently that didn't find agreement with at least one of the necessary parties involved and so the Austrian federation has presented Sports director Alpo Suhonen as Interim coach who will be behind the bench in the Olympic qualifier tournament in September. Suhonen's job is basically to modernize the training of coaches and the player development but I guess with the tournament in Riga already being only 4 months away there was no time yet to hire a coach.

Suhonen has a decent vita as coach and is basically doing a reasonable job in his Standard role but is also said to be a Little bit of a difficult character which is imho an obstacle to the most important task he will face as NT coach: to motivate the best Players to actually suit up for the team. Too many of the best AUT Players have resigned from NT Play which is the major reason why AUT came short in the div. IA tournament. If OEHV wants to have a reasonable chance to see the 2018 games getting some of the veterans back who have quit after Sochi is a must (not that I think this will happen).

Are any of the former NT assistant coaches capable of stepping in or is Austria that short of qualified coaches?? Or, is this more political?

I always remeber this:

In 1989, Cherry was asked about Winnipeg Jets assistant coach Alpo Suhonen, who is Finnish, and quipped, “Alpo? Isn’t that a dog food?” The team’s owner, Barry Shenkarow, called Cherry a racist and threatened to sue him.

Sorry, saw this just now.
Yes, Austria is definitely short of qualified coaches. The last Austrian to coach the NT (and I guess the first in decades) was Herbert Pöck from 2004 to 2005, he got sacked after AUT got relegated in the IHWC in Vienna/Innsbruck. The last Austrian head coach of a pro team was Kurt Harand (Vienna and briefly Linz) about 15 years ago, since then all head coach positions in EBEL were filled with coaches from abroad (Alexander Mellitzer as interim coach at KAC this season after Chris Mason was fired was the lone exception). Also in the junior NTs and second tier club teams coaches used to be resp. still are with an overwhemling majority from abroad.

Austria hasn't really developped a program to educate coaches on an adequate level in the past, this topic has been completely neglected for ages. One has to give credit to Alpo Suhonen who on being hired as sports director by the federation a few years ago immediately started to refor the coaching development programs (and hired Swiss Roger Bader who was a coaching instructor for SEHV before). The aim was to have all junior/youth NTs coached by Austrians which is by now the case and the federation heavily tries to get former pro players or players closing in on retirement involved in these programms (with success). This is one very important initiative, Austria lacks qualified coaches and a up to date system for developping players on all levels so if we want to get better that's absolutely the way to go.

Time to revive this thread with some news on the preparation campaign of Team AUT for IHWC 2018 in Denmark.

Head Coach Roger Bader who lead the team back to the Elite at the 2017 Div IA tournament after Austria missed out on promotion the year before for the first time in 5 consecutive attempts since 2006 has managed to introduce a 6 week preparation phase with 10 games (previously there used to be 4 weeks of camp I think). The camps started with only a hendful of players as the bulk of the Austrian EBEL teams were still in the playoffs then, gradually players from eliminated teams have been added but as of now after the first 4 games (2x vs. HUN, 2x vs. ITA) there's plenty of young development players (foremost from the AlpsHL farmteams of Salzburg and Klagenfurt) on the team who have only little or in same cases no experience in EBEL so far. With such an inexperienced squad (the initial version had 10 senior NT dedutants) wins are not really to be expected in the prep games and more or less it turned out that case so far.

The preparation campaign of Team AUT is concluded with the following test games have been played with changing line-ups as head coach Roger Bader shifted players from the camp roster and the players from Red Bull Salzburg (EBEL finals) were joining in later.

Roster for IHWC 2018, 27 players still on the list which will all travel to Copenhagen. On site in Denmark two more cuts will be made. Players in bold will (if not cut) make their IHWC debut, for players in bold blue it will be the first appearance in a world championship tournament on senior level overall.

AUT got relegated in the last 6 IHWC participations since 2005, on the last two occasions (2013 and 2015) the team ended up with the record number of points for a team getting relegated (5), so one can say that hockey god wasn't really on the Austrians' side.
Avoiding relegation will likely need the assistance from the hockey god now as the seeding of the groups put Austria in the one with the unrelegatable Slovaks (not that they are not heavy favorites to end up ahead of Team AUT anyway but still not optimal for us). The teams to beat are most likely France and Belarus, both not out of reach in general as plenty of friendlies suggest but in the last IHWCs it just didn't work out. Scheduling favors AUT in the game vs. FRA as for the French it is a back-to-back game while Austria has a rest day inbetween but against BLR it is the other way round.

Compared to IHWC 2015 Austria probably has more skill on the team due to the higher profile youngsters of Lukas Haudum (struggled a bit in SEL but nevertheless) and Dominik Zwerger (great first senior season in NLA) but defense is shallow as ever. Dominique Heinrich as supposed key player was quite unstable in the EBEL play-offs one can only hope that Stefan Ulmer, the other D supposed to orchestrate plays is in top shape. The remaining D-men are mostly role players in their EBEL teams with limited special team (esp PP) ice time. Goaltending is an issue too, Bernhard Starkbaum is the clear #1 and wasn't exactly brilliant in the EBEL play-offs. David Madlener was okish in the prep games I saw (esp vs. SLO) and David Kickert was very shaky against KAZ.